May 25, 2007

Holding my fingers back, regretfully

I'd love to type a few hundred words on the major testing story in Florida this week, the Department of Education's acknowledgment Wednesday that they blew the scores on last year's tests. But here's why I haven't:

This summer I'm teaching in Sarasota Wednesday evenings, and all that afternoon and evening I was either prepping, in class, or driving between Sarasota and Tampa.

Yesterday was the last school day for my children, and I picked up one child at school and then had my beautiful, wonderful children with me for the rest of the day. My daughter decided that she wanted me to drive her to the afternoon martial-arts class instead of go with her mom to the evening class, and my son had baseball practice a little later. (His Little League team is in the county's championship, having won their local league.)

That, plus a few other obligations, has meant that I've chosen not to engage in link sausage or discussion. And when I discovered this morning that I had the same attainment figures for Venezuelan natives in Venezuela and Mexican natives in the U.S., that gave me some confirmation that I need to concentrate on the task at hand. (Short explanation: I put a duplicate file of the Venezuela SAS file in the folder where I kept the other materials and mixed them up. All sorted out now.)

(For the 2.5 readers keeping track of my research, this is an extension of last year's Social Science History Association paper, where I tried out some new estimation techniques on U.S. census data. That worked quite well, so now I'm using openly-available historical international census data.)